There is no self-care challenge this week, people, because I’m definitely not in a self-caring mood and I don’t want to be a hypocrite and tell people to do what I feel incapable of doing myself.
The news from Ukraine are too painful and present an unrelenting source of stress. Yesterday, a couple hundred provocateurs occupied the municipal administration building in Donetsk. They destroyed Ukrainian flags, substituted them with Soviet flags, and walked around, yelling, “Putin, come save us!” and singing the anthem of the USSR and The International.
My mother is from that region and she says, “I can’t believe my parents will now lie buried in the ground held by occupation forces.”
I watched a live streaming video from Kharkiv, the city where I grew up, yesterday. A big group of very angry people hovered around Sumskaya Street, looking for “Ukrainian nationalists.” Finally, they found somebody who they decided had to be a Ukrainian nationalist and started beating him. Sumskaya is the central street in the city, and this poor fellow was just walking there peacefully when people, drunk on propaganda and in a state of uncontrollable hysteria, attacked him.
I turned the live stream off because this is more than I can bear.
Later, we decided to watch a musical TV show from Russia. “It’s just people singing, how bad can it be?” we thought.
And of course it ended up being really bad. The participants declared that the USSR had been “a grrrrreat country!” and proceeded to offer an endless stream of sexist, racist, and xenophobic jokes and comments. The most offensive statements were directed at Indian people.
If I could only say, “This is all Putin, the Russian people are not to blame, it’s all their horrible government’s fault.” But that isn’t true. The people want their USSR back. They are very open and direct about it. They tried the alternative, didn’t like it, and now want the Soviet Union back.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment